What is Public History?

When most people think about public history they think it refers to historians who work outside academia, in museums or archives, in television and film, or who are engaged in digitizing history on the web, carrying out research for companies or writing popular historical works. All of this is true, but public history is also much more.

In broad terms, public history deals with the ways in which history is created and presented in the public arena. This includes traditional sites of institutional history (like museums and archives), but it can also refer to many different sites of collective memory and how history is expressed in film, on the web, or in photographic scrapbooks. To study public history is to come to terms with the contested nature of history itself, and to situate narratives of history within a broader field of public memory, identity, and political/institutional interests.